neither the spirit of business, absorbing, eager, and overreaching,
ungenerous and hard in its dealings, keen and bitter in its
competitions, low and sordid in its purposes; nor that of ambition,
selfish, mercenary, restless, circumventing, living only in the opinion
of others, envious of the good fortune of others, miserably vain of its
own success, unjust, unscrupulous, and slanderous.
He that does me a favor, hath bound me to make him a return of
thankfulness. The obligation comes not by covenant, nor by his own
express intention; but by the nature of the thing; and is a duty
springing up within the spirit of the obliged person, to whom it is more
natural to love his friend, and to do good for good, than to return evil
for evil; because a man may forgive an injury, but he must never forget
a good turn. He that refuses to do good to them whom he is bound to
love, or to love that which did him good, is unnatural and monstrous in
his affections, and thinks all the world born to minister to him; with a
greediness worse than that of the sea, which, although it receives all
rivers into itself, yet it furnishes the clouds and springs with a
return of all they need. Our duty to those who are our benefactors is,
to esteem and love their persons, to make them proportionable returns of
service, or duty, or profit, according as we can, or as they need, or as
opportunity presents itself; and according to the greatness of their
kindnesses.
The generous man cannot but regret to see dissensions and disputes among
his brethren. Only the base and ungenerous delight in discord. It is the
poorest occupation of humanity to labor to make men think worse of each
other, as the press, and too commonly the pulpit, changing places with
the hustings and the tribune, do. The duty of the Mason is to endeavor
to make man think better of his neighbor; to quiet, instead of
aggravating difficulties; to bring together those who are severed or
estranged; to keep friends from becoming foes, and to persuade foes to
become friends. To do this, he must needs control his own passions, and
be not rash and hasty, nor swift to take offence, nor easy to be
angered.
For anger is a professed enemy to counsel. It is a direct storm, in
which no man can be heard to speak or call from without; for if you
counsel gently, you are disregarded; if you urge it and be vehement, you
provoke it more. It is neither manly nor ingenuous. It makes marriage to
be a necessary and unavoidable trouble; friendships and societies and
familiarities, to be intolerable. It multiplies the evils of
drunkenness, and makes the levities of wine to run into madness. It
makes innocent jesting to be the beginning of tragedies. It turns
friendship into hatred; it makes a man lose himself, and his reason and
his argument, in disputation. It turns the desires of knowledge into an
itch of wrangling. It adds insolency to power. It turns justice into
cruelty, and judgment into oppression. It changes discipline into
tediousness and hatred of liberal institution. It makes a prosperous man
to be envied, and the unfortunate to be unpitied.
See, therefore, that first controlling your own temper, and governing
your own passions, you fit yourself to keep peace and harmony among
other men, and especially the brethren. Above all remember that Masonry
is the realm of peace, and that "_among Masons there must be no
dissension, but only that noble emulation, which can best work and best
agree_." Wherever there is strife and hatred among the brethren, there
is no Masonry; for Masonry is Peace, and Brotherly Love, and Concord.
Masonry is the great Peace Society of the world. Wherever it exists, it
struggles to prevent international difficulties and disputes; and to
bind Republics, Kingdoms, and Empires together in one great band of
peace and amity. It would not so often struggle in vain, if Masons knew
their power and valued their oaths.
Who can sum up the horrors and woes accumulated in a single war? Masonry
is not dazzled with all its pomp and circumstance, all its glitter and
glory. War comes with its bloody hand into our very dwellings. It takes
from ten thousand homes those who lived there in peace and comfort, held
by the tender ties of family and kindred. It drags them away, to die
untended, of fever or exposure, in infectious climes; or to be hacked,
torn, and mangled in the fierce fight; to fall on the gory field, to
rise no more, or to be borne away, in awful agony, to noisome and horrid
hospitals. The groans of the battle-field are echoed in sighs of
bereavement from thousands of desolated hearths. There is a skeleton in
every house, a vacant chair at every table. Returning, the soldier
brings worse sorrow to his home, by the infection which he has caught,
of camp-vices. The country is demoralized. The national mind is brought
down, from the noble interchange of kind offices with another people, to
wrath and revenge, and base pride, and the habit of measuring brute
strength against brute strength, in battle. Treasures are expended, that
would suffice to build ten thousand churches, hospitals, and
universities, or rib and tie together a continent with rails of iron. If
that treasure were sunk in the sea, it would be calamity enough; but it
is put to worse use; for it is expended in cutting into the veins and
arteries of human life, until the earth is deluged with a sea of blood.
Such are the lessons of this Degree. You have vowed to make them the
rule, the law, and the guide of your life and conduct. If you do so, you
will be entitled, because fitted, to advance in Masonry. If you do not,
you have already gone too far.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
VII.
PROVOST AND JUDGE.
The lesson which this Degree inculcates is JUSTICE, in decision and
judgment, and in our intercourse and dealing with other men.
In a country where trial by jury is known, every intelligent man is
liable to be called on to act as a judge, either of fact alone, or of
fact and law mingled; and to assume the heavy responsibilities which
belong to that character.
Those who are invested with the power of judgment should judge the
causes of all persons uprightly and impartially, without any personal
consideration of the power of the mighty, or the bribe of the rich, or
the needs of the poor. That is the cardinal rule, which no one will
dispute; though many fail to observe it. But they must do more. They
must divest themselves of prejudice and preconception. They must hear
patiently, remember accurately, and weigh carefully the facts and the
arguments offered before them. They must not leap hastily to
conclusions, nor form opinions before they have heard all. They must not
presume crime or fraud. They must neither be ruled by stubborn pride of
opinion, nor be too facile and yielding to the views and arguments of
others. In deducing the motive from the proven act, they must not assign
to the act either the best or the worst motives, but those which they
would think it just and fair for the world to assign to it, if they
themselves had done it; nor must they endeavor to make many little
circumstances, that weigh nothing separately, weigh much together, to
prove their own acuteness and sagacity. These are sound rules for every
juror, also, to observe.
In our intercourse with others, there are two kinds of injustice: the
first of those who offer an injury; the second, of those who have it in
their power to _avert_ an injury from those to whom it is offered, and
yet do it not. So _active_ injustice may be done in two ways--by force
and by fraud,--of which force is lion-like, and fraud fox-like,--both
utterly repugnant to social duty, but fraud the more detestable.
Every wrong done by one man to another, whether it affect his person,
his property, his happiness, or his reputation, is an offense against
the law of justice. The field of this Degree is therefore a wide and
vast one; and Masonry seeks for the most impressive mode of enforcing
the law of justice, and the most effectual means of preventing wrong and
injustice.
To this end it teaches this great and momentous truth: that wrong and
injustice once done cannot be undone; but are eternal in their
consequences; once committed, are numbered with the irrevocable Past;
that the wrong that is done _contains_ its own retributive penalty as
surely and as naturally as the acorn contains the oak. Its consequences
are its punishment; it needs no other, and can have no heavier; they are
involved in its commission, and cannot be separated from it. A wrong
done to another is an injury done to our own Nature, an offence against
our own souls, a disfiguring of the image of the Beautiful and Good.
Punishment is not the execution of a sentence, but the occurrence of an
effect. It is ordained to follow guilt, not by the decree of God as a
judge, but by a law enacted by Him as the Creator and Legislator of the
Universe. It is not an arbitrary and artificial annexation, but an
ordinary and logical consequence; and therefore must be borne by the
wrong-doer, and through him may flow on to others. It is the decision of
the infinite justice of God, in the form of law.
There can be no interference with, or remittance of, or protection from,
the natural effects of our wrongful acts. God will not interpose between
the cause and its consequence; and in that sense there can be no
forgiveness of sins. The act which has debased our soul may be repented
of, may be turned from; but the injury is done. The debasement may be
redeemed by after-efforts, the stain obliterated by bitterer struggles
and severer sufferings; but the efforts and the endurance which might
have raised the soul to the loftiest heights are now exhausted in merely
regaining what it has lost. There must always be a wide difference
between him who only ceases to do evil, and him who has always done
well.
He will certainly be a far more scrupulous watcher over his conduct, and
far more careful of his deeds, who believes that those deeds will
inevitably bear their natural consequences, exempt from after
intervention, than he who believes that penitence and pardon will at any
time unlink the chain of sequences. Surely we shall do less wrong and
injustice, if the conviction is fixed and embedded in our souls that
everything done is done irrevocably, that even the Omnipotence of God
cannot _uncommit_ a deed, cannot make that _undone_ which has _been
done_; that every act of ours _must_ bear its allotted fruit, according
to the everlasting laws,--must remain forever ineffaceably inscribed on
the tablets of Universal Nature.
If you have wronged another, you may grieve, repent, and resolutely
determine against any such weakness in future. You may, so far as it is
possible, make reparation. It is well. The injured party may forgive
you, according to the meaning of human language; but the deed is _done_;
and all the powers of Nature, were they to conspire in your behalf,
could not make it _undone_; the consequences to the body, the
consequences to the soul, though no man may perceive them, _are there_,
are written in the annals of the Past, and must reverbrate throughout
all time.
Repentance for a wrong done, bears, like every other act, its own fruit,
the fruit of purifying the heart and amending the Future, but not of
effacing the Past. The commission of the wrong is an irrevocable act;
but it does not incapacitate the soul to do right for the future. Its
consequences cannot be expunged; but its course need not be pursued.
Wrong and evil perpetrated, though ineffaceable, call for no despair,
but for efforts more energetic than before. Repentance is still as valid
as ever; but it is valid to secure the Future, not to obliterate the
Past.
Even the pulsations of the air, once set in motion by the human voice,
cease not to exist with the sounds to which they gave rise. Their
quickly-attenuated force soon becomes inaudible to human ears. But the
waves of air thus raised perambulate the surface of earth and ocean, and
in less than twenty hours, every atom of the atmosphere takes up the
altered movement due to that infinitesimal portion of primitive motion
which has been conveyed to it through countless channels, and which
must continue to influence its path throughout its future existence. The
air is one vast library on whose pages is forever written all that man
has ever said or even whispered. There, in their mutable, but unerring
characters, mixed with the earliest, as well as the latest signs of
mortality, stand forever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises
unfulfilled; perpetuating, in the movements of each particle, all in
unison, the testimony of man's changeful will. God reads that book,
though we cannot.
So earth, air, and ocean are the eternal witnesses of the acts that we
have done. No motion impressed by natural causes or by human agency is
ever obliterated. The track of every keel which has ever disturbed the
surface of the ocean remains forever registered in the future movements
of all succeeding particles which may occupy its place. Every criminal
is by the laws of the Almighty irrevocably chained to the testimony of
his crime; for every atom of his mortal frame, through whatever changes
its particles may migrate, will still retain, adhering to it through
every combination, some movement derived from that very muscular effort
by which the crime itself was perpetrated.
What if our faculties should be so enhanced in a future life as to
enable us to perceive and trace the ineffaceable consequences of our
idle words and evil deeds, and render our remorse and grief as eternal
as those consequences themselves? No more fearful punishment to a
superior intelligence can be conceived, than to see still in action,
with the consciousness that it must continue in action forever, a cause
of wrong put in motion by itself ages before.
Masonry, by its teachings, endeavors to restrain men from the commission
of injustice and acts of wrong and outrage. Though it does not endeavor
to usurp the place of religion, still its code of morals proceeds upon
other principles than the municipal law; and it condemns and punishes
offences which neither that law punishes nor public opinion condemns. In
the Masonic law, to cheat and overreach in trade, at the bar, in
politics, are deemed no more venial than theft; nor a deliberate lie
than perjury; nor slander than robbery; nor seduction than murder.
Especially it condemns those wrongs of which the doer induces another to
partake. _He_ may repent; _he_ may, after agonizing struggles, regain
the path of virtue; _his_ spirit may reachieve its purity through much
anguish, after many strifes; but the weaker fellow-creature whom he led
astray, whom he made a sharer in his guilt, but whom he cannot make a
sharer in his repentance and amendment, whose downward course (the first
step of which _he_ taught) he cannot check, but is compelled to
witness,--what forgiveness of sins can avail him there? _There_ is his
perpetual, his inevitable punishment, which no repentance can alleviate,
and no mercy can remit.
Let us be just, also, in judging of other men's motives. We know but
little of the real merits or demerits of any fellow-creature. We can
rarely say with certainty that this man is more guilty than that, or
even that this man is very good or very wicked. Often the basest men
leave behind them excellent reputations. There is scarcely one of us who
has not, at some time in his life, been on the edge of the commission of
a crime. Every one of us can look back, and shuddering see the time when
our feet stood upon the slippery crags that overhung the abyss of guilt;
and when, if temptation had been a little more urgent, or a little
longer continued, if penury had pressed us a little harder, or a little
more wine had further disturbed our intellect, dethroned our judgment,
and aroused our passions, our feet would have slipped, and we should
have fallen, never to rise again.
We may be able to say--"_This_ man has lied, has pilfered, has forged,
has embezzled moneys intrusted to him; and _that_ man has gone through
life with clean hands." But we cannot say that the former has not
struggled long, though unsuccessfully, against temptations under which
the second would have succumbed without an effort. We can say which has
the cleanest _hands_ before _man_; but not which has the cleanest _soul_
before God. We may be able to say, _this_ man has committed adultery,
and _that_ man has been ever chaste; but we cannot tell but that the
innocence of one may have been due to the coldness of his heart, to the
absence of a motive, to the presence of a fear, to the slight degree of
the temptation; nor but that the fall of the other may have been
preceded by the most vehement self-contest, caused by the most
over-mastering frenzy, and atoned for by the most hallowing repentance.
Generosity as well as niggardliness may be a mere yielding to native
temperament; and in the eye of Heaven, a long life of beneficence in one
man may have cost less effort, and may indicate less virtue and less
sacrifice of interest, than a few rare hidden acts of kindness wrung by
duty out of the reluctant and unsympathizing nature of the other. There
may be more real merit, more self-sacrificing effort, more of the
noblest elements of moral grandeur, in a life of failure, sin, and
shame, than in a career, to our eyes, of stainless integrity.
When we condemn or pity the fallen, how do we know that, tempted like
him, we should not have fallen like him, as soon, and perhaps with less
resistance? How can we know what _we_ should do if we were out of
employment, famine crouching, gaunt, and hungry, on our fireless hearth,
and our children wailing for bread? _We fall not because we are not
enough tempted!_ He that _hath_ fallen may be at heart as honest as we.
How do we know that _our_ daughter, sister, wife, could resist the
abandonment, the desolation, the distress, the temptation, that
sacrificed the virtue of their poor abandoned sister of shame? Perhaps
they also have not fallen, because they have not been sorely tempted!
Wisely are we directed to pray that we may not be exposed to temptation.
Human justice must be ever uncertain. How many judicial murders have
been committed through ignorance of the phenomena of insanity! How many
men hung for murder who were no more murderers at heart than the jury
that tried and the judge that sentenced them! It may well be doubted
whether the administration of human laws, in every country, is not one
gigantic mass of injustice and wrong. God seeth not as man seeth; and
the most abandoned criminal, black as he is before the world, may yet
have continued to keep some little light burning in a corner of his
soul, which would long since have gone out in that of those who walk
proudly in the sunshine of immaculate fame, if they had been tried and
tempted like the poor outcast.
We do not know even the _outside_ life of men. We are not competent to
pronounce even on their _deeds_. We do not know half the acts of
wickedness or virtue, even of our most immediate fellows. We cannot say,
with certainty, even of our nearest friend, that he has not committed a
particular sin, and broken a particular commandment. Let each man ask
his own heart! Of how many of our best and of our worst acts and
qualities are our most intimate associates utterly unconscious! How many
virtues does not the world give us credit for, that we do not possess;
or vices condemn us for, of which we are not the slaves! It is but a
small portion of our evil deeds and thoughts that ever comes to light;
and of our few redeeming goodnesses, the largest portion is known to
God alone.
We shall, therefore, be just in judging of other men, only when we are
charitable; and we should assume the prerogative of judging others only
when the duty is forced upon us; since we are so almost certain to err,
and the consequences of error are so serious. No man need covet the
office of judge; for in assuming it he assumes the gravest and most
oppressive responsibility. Yet you have assumed it; we all assume it;
for man is ever ready to judge, and ever ready to condemn his neighbor,
while upon the same state of case he acquits himself. See, therefore,
that you exercise your office cautiously and charitably, lest, in
passing judgment upon the criminal, you commit a greater wrong than that
for which you condemn him, and the consequences of which must be
eternal.
The faults and crimes and follies of other men are not unimportant to
us; but form a part of our moral discipline. War and bloodshed at a
distance, and frauds which do not affect our pecuniary interest, yet
touch us in our feelings, and concern our moral welfare. They have much
to do with all thoughtful hearts. The public eye may look unconcernedly
on the miserable victim of vice, and that shattered wreck of a man may
move the multitude to laughter or to scorn. But to the Mason, it is the
form of sacred humanity that is before him; it is an erring
fellow-being; a desolate, forlorn, forsaken soul; and his thoughts,
enfolding the poor wretch, will be far deeper than those of
indifference, ridicule, or contempt. All human offences, the whole
system of dishonesty, evasion, circumventing, forbidden indulgence, and
intriguing ambition, in which men are struggling with each other, will
be looked upon by a thoughtful Mason, not merely as a scene of mean
toils and strifes, but as the solemn conflicts of immortal minds, for
ends vast and momentous as their own being. It is a sad and unworthy
strife, and may well be viewed with indignation; but that indignation
must melt into pity. For the stakes for which these gamesters play are
not those which they imagine, not those which are in sight. For example,
this man plays for a petty office, and gains it; but the real stake he
gains is sycophancy, uncharitableness, slander, and deceit.
Good men are too proud of their goodness. They are respectable; dishonor
comes not near them; their countenance has weight and influence; their
robes are unstained; the poisonous breath of calumny has never been
breathed upon their fair name. How easy it is for them to look down with
scorn upon the poor degraded offender; to pass him by with a lofty step;
to draw up the folds of their garment around them, that they may not be
soiled by his touch! Yet the Great Master of Virtue did not so; but
descended to familiar intercourse with publicans and sinners, with the
Samaritan woman, with the outcasts and the Pariahs of the Hebrew world.
Many men think themselves better, in proportion as they can detect sin
in others! When they go over the catalogue of their neighbor's unhappy
derelictions of temper or conduct, they often, amidst much apparent
concern, feel a secret exultation, that destroys all their own
pretensions to wisdom and moderation, and even to virtue. Many even take
actual pleasure in the sins of others; and this is the case with every
one whose thoughts are often employed in agreeable comparisons of his
own virtues with his neighbors' faults.
The power of gentleness is too little seen in the world; the subduing
influences of pity, the might of love, the control of mildness over
passion, the commanding majesty of that perfect character which mingles
grave displeasure with grief and pity for the offender. So it is that a
Mason should treat his brethren who go astray. Not with bitterness; nor
yet with good-natured easiness, nor with worldly indifference, nor with
the philosophic coldness, nor with a laxity of conscience, that accounts
everything well, that passes under the seal of public opinion; but with
charity, with pitying loving-kindness.
The human heart will not bow willingly to what is infirm and wrong in
human nature. If it yields to us, it must yield to what is divine in us.
The wickedness of my neighbor cannot submit to my wickedness; his
sensuality, for instance, to my anger against his vices. My faults are
not the instruments that are to arrest his faults. And therefore
impatient reformers, and denouncing preachers, and hasty reprovers, and
angry parents, and irritable relatives generally fail, in their several
departments, to reclaim the erring.